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Saturday, February 11, 2017

MANAGEMENT /LEADERSHIP SPECIAL ......Arianna Huffington on the link between leadership and well-being

Arianna Huffington on the link between leadership and well-being

Better sleep and less
stress can improve your performance. The Thrive Global founder shares some
tools that could help.

Stress and burnout are
on the rise, as leaders and
employees alike struggle to keep up with the relentless pace of business. But
there’s another way. Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post,
has turned to tackle work-life issues with Thrive Global, a media platform that
seeks to improve both well-being and performance. In this interview with
McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland, Huffington discusses how to disconnect from technology
to reconnect with ourselves, as well as why supportive policies might help
companies get ahead. An edited version of her remarks follows.

Interview transcript

Technology has had some
incredible, unintended consequences. It has invaded every aspect of our lives.
What we are losing is the ability to truly disconnect from technology and
reconnect with ourselves.

Health as a competitive advantage

[We’re talking about]
$300 billion in indirect healthcare costs, $500 billion in disengagement, and
more than 70 percent of companies describing stress as a top problem in the
company—and this is all within the United States. This is a huge problem in
China, in Japan, in South Korea, and all over Europe. It is truly a global
epidemic.

What gives me optimism
is that the companies and the leaders that are ahead of the curve, that are
introducing a lot of these policies in their companies and seeing the results,
are going to have an incredible competitive edge.

More-effective leaders

The first step is to
become conversant with the science. If we continue to congratulate employees for working 24/7 or for being
always on—then we are ignoring the science. We are ignoring the fact that they’re operating in an
impaired state, that being up for 24 hours is the cognitive equivalent of being
drunk.

My goal is to create
new role models, and to bring business leaders, media leaders, and country
leaders who are admired, and have them talk about how, in fact, when they
prioritize their own well-being—when, as they tell us on airplanes, they put
their own oxygen mask on first—they’re more-effective leaders.

How to disconnect

The standard practice
when somebody goes on vacation is to put an out-of-office message on, and you
get that truly useless out-of-office email from someone. Then five minutes
later, more often than not, you get an email. Because we’re all kind of programmed, once we see an email, to respond.

So Thrive Global created
an app that allows you, if you opt in as an employee or as an individual, to
have your emails deleted during vacation. Suddenly, you have this magical
experience of zero emails in your inbox for the duration of your vacation. And
everybody who’s done that, including me, can testify to the fact that you
return to work deeply recharged.

I’m now convinced
that a good day begins the night before. I like to end my day with a 30-minute transition to
sleep; I give myself a half hour, when I turn off my devices. One of the first
products that we produced is a charging station that looks like a bed. Because
human beings learn through ritual, we leave it outside everybody’s bedrooms.
The goal of that is to educate children, that from the time they get a phone,
that their phones should not be on their nightstand.

The vast majority of people now
keep their phones on their nightstand, and the excuse is that they need them to
wake them up. Well, I think there are some beautiful old-fashioned alarm clocks
for that. As we see the rise in stress, anxiety, and depression among teenagers
and millennials, we realize that there’s a direct connection between our
ability to disconnect and mental-health issues.